1. Istrianna 2. Tango on the border 3. Sarajewska 4. A yiddishe crime story 5. Prodaj dinozaura 6. Giant donkey caravan 7. Sen musli 8. Barbarian's child 9. Kawony 10. Pora 11. W samochodzie taty 12. The silence of fish 13. Wycieraczki 14. The empty place song
Line-up:
Mikolaj Trzaska - bass clarinet, saxophones, farfissa, organs, accordion Andrzej Stasiuk - voice Jarogniew Milewski - keyboards & production Johannes Frisch - double bass Abbas Zulfugarof - double bass Olo Walicki - double bass Paul Wirkus - drums Tomasz Gwincinski - drums Jarek Czarnecki - drums
About:
We present another literary project in Kilogram Records. We decided to continue the series of linking music with literature started by Mikolaj Trzaska and Marcin Swietlicki's album "Cierpienie i Wypoczynek". Then there was Andruchoid recorded together with Ukrainian writer and poet Yuri Andrukhovych. And now the time has come for Andrzej Stasiuk and "Kantry"
The first impulse to record this album was the order of the Internet radio COPERNIKUS. The broadcast had its Berlin premiere in November 2005. However the idea to prepare something like a radio drama with participation of Andrzej Stasiuk had appeared much earlier. Mikolaj was collecting materials for this project for a few years. In the beginning he liked Stasiuk's voice timbre and the way he reads. Never before has he met, as he calls it, "a phenomenon of absorbing boredom filled with tension".
At first they recorded fragments of the drama in the forest, then Stasiuk was sitting in the car where as he was reading the novel, he pressed accelerator pedal each time he came across a "rougher" part of the book. But most of these "sound scenes" dropped out in postproduction. On the whole a lot has been changed and finally the album "Kantry" resembled the Berlin broadcast to a small extent. Dictaphone recordings caused the most confusion. They come from Stasiuk's journey in the Balkans: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dictaphone served the role of a camera. It recorded everything that was possible to record, starting with the sounds of streets in Sarajevo, conversations in a Balkan bar and finishing with the singing of a muezzin from a minaret in Sarajevo.
The music on the album is to a great extent inspired by Stasiuk's prose. There are compositions written by Trzaska to Andrzej's theater plays - they have never been used in them because of their autonomy.
"Kantry" is a free translation of Stasiuk to the music language of Trzaska. "Kantry" is a diary of a journey.
Reviews:
Mikolaj Trzaska is a musician who deserves wider recognition than he does today. He is not only an excellent sax player, as a composer he is also not afraid to take risks and to look for a renewed, more expressive musical language without becoming too experimental or without chasing away potential listeners. He has made some really excellent sax trio albums with the brothers Marcin and Brat Oles, especially "LA Sketch Up" and "Mikro Muzik", both also issued on the Polish Kilogram Records and highly recommended. On these albums, jazz sounds as you've rarely heard it, soft-spoken, sophisticated, nostalgic, yet raw, creative and full of tension at the same time. Interesting. Next to these albums, he's also written a lot of work for theater and television, and this albums fits into that category. It was originally ordered for an internet radio drama, but the music on this album is far removed from the original idea. The input for the music appears to come, not from the play, but from dictaphone recordings made from the author's journey in the Balkans: Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The dictaphone recorded everything that was possible to record, starting with the sounds of streets in Sarajevo, conversations in a Balkan bar and finishing with the singing of a muezzin from a minaret in Sarajevo, but also church bells can be heard, dogs barking, car doors slamming, etc. Right through these ambient sounds Mikolaj Trzaska weaves music in his own specific style, often solo, or accompanied in the lightest possible fashion, sometimes an accordion, often an organ, or just bass, or drums, but never with the whole band together. It is odd music, sometimes bizarre ("Barbarian's Child"), sometimes of extreme beauty ("The Silence of Fish"), but always airy and accessible. And what he makes of this is really powerful : the human emotions laid bare, pain, longing, distress, anxiety, joy, nostalgia. And it doesn't really matter whether you understand any of the Slavonic languages heard on the tape. Just let yourself go and listen to the fragile soul of man, made a little bit more eloquent by Mikolaj Trzaska. (stef, freejazz-stef.blogspot.com)
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